The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'a group of hippies dancing in a field.'
There were once serious activist movements in the US. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the environmental movement all created meaningful change in their day. The civil rights movement brought us a list of societal reforms, including desegregation and the Civil Rights Act. The antiwar movement made public the abuses of the military-industrial complex, going so far as to break into an FBI office to bring evidence of COINTELPRO to light. The environmental movement gave rise to the EPA, as well as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
These are solid accomplishments, brought about by a counterculture that has long since disappeared. There were echoes of its anti-establishment spirit in the WTO protests of 1999, the Occupy Wall Street movement a decade later, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations more recently, but these groups accomplished relatively little. And today, there is no meaningful counterculture in the US.
Fifty years ago, a single person with a high school diploma could own a house, own a car, support a spouse, raise kids, and send those kids to college on the income from a single, working class job. Since then, wages have barely gone up while the cost of living has skyrocketed. This trend represents the wholesale theft of the economic power of individuals in our country. I don't think it's a coincidence that this theft of our economic power coincides with the disappearance of efficacious political counterculture.
As our economic power was being stolen, the powers that be began locking up far more people, and for far longer. So the death of American counterculture was accompanied by both economic decline and the rise of mass incarceration. While the War on Drugs played a big part in this, this War itself was used to systematically silence political dissidents by incarcerating them.
More recently, especially since 9/11, an emergent technological repression has been added to the more traditional repression of dissident voices by legal and economic means. Mass surveillance replaced privacy and government monitoring of activist groups intensified. These days, merely publishing true information can be a serious crime. Just ask Julian Assange.
We face technological repression, but technological empowerment is also at our fingertips. Today, we can share and coordinate as never before. Tomorrow, we'll be partnering with AI in all sorts of ways. In other words, all of the tools necessary to organize a new counterculture are accessible. A new counterculture could technically arise.
I think such a counterculture is already forming, not as a homogeneous mass, but as a network of smaller, specialized social networks. The shameless lying by officials and the media about covid drove many to question the official story and to seek out others of like mind. Right now, all of these people are finding each other.
What would a 21st century counterculture even look like? Sending emails? People honking their car horns to protest? Okay, but what I'd like to see more of is the abandonment of legacy systems in favor of more equitable alternative systems. If we can escape the tyranny of Justin Sun by creating Hive, a great deal more may be possible.
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